Akira
by SoloMoon
Summary: In which Tom Berenson learns that DNA allergies are a pain in the butt, that Jake has a frankly ridiculous number of morphs, that stubbornness is not always a virtue, and that there's a difference between surviving the war and living through it. Set about three months after the end of the series. Eleutherophobia pt. 4
1. Liminal

A/N: Set about three months after "Day the Earth Stood Still." Written to the sounds of "Jumper" by Third Eye Blind. ( watch?v=QdgCajndgNw)

"You have to help my brother!" I gasped, thrusting the green anole lizard in my hands at the nurse behind the desk. "I think he's allergic to cats!"

The poor woman looked at the lizard, and then slowly up at my face. "All right, son," she said gently in the voice she probably normally used to appease crazy people. "I'm sure it'll be all right. If you just want to calm down we can fill out one of these forms-"

I slammed my palm against the countertop. "You don't understand! He could be dying!"

I'm not _dying_, Jake said petulantly. I just- He sneezed violently, tumbling off my hand in the process. Which was fortunate, because then he threw up on the check-in desk.

At least now the nurse was no longer looking at me like I was losing my mind. Instead she was staring in alarm at the lizard on her desk like any second now it was going to turn into a Bievilerd and eat her.

"Are you okay?" I asked Jake.

I'm _fine_. It really didn't help his case that he used exactly the same whiny tone as he'd always had when six years old and trying to convince our mom he wasn't ready to go to bed yet.

"Um." The nurse was staring between me, Jake, and the mostly-digested spider he'd just barfed up on her desk.

I swear I'm okay.

"Look, we'll get a doctor to help you as soon as possible," the nurse said, finally pulling a Kleenex out of the box on her desk and dropping it over the spider. "But we really do need you to fill out the intake form first."

"Yeah, okay." I gave up, mostly because Jake seemed to have stopped morphing for the moment and really did sound more or less okay.

"Thank you."

It'll be fine, Jake said, like he was trying to reassure me.

"Great," I said. "Think you'll be able to demorph before the staff calls someone from the psychiatric ward to do something about the guy claiming his brother is a lizard?"

Jake sent me a mental sigh but scurried down off the desk and onto the floor, turning back into a human while I wrote down his name, age, and insurance card info. (I wasn't sure what to do with the "occupation" box so I left it blank, and the "height" and "weight" ones kept changing by the hour-that was part of our problem-so I didn't bother with those either.) There was a long list of boxes I was supposed to check off for previous conditions; I left those blank except for the one asking about allergies, where I wrote "possibly cats? (does not include tigers)."

"Oh my god." The nurse was watching Jake in wide-eyed horror. "Is it _supposed_ to look like that?"

"Probably." I didn't look up from where I was signing the line marked "parent and/or guardian" (if anyone tried to dispute it then I'd burn that bridge when I came to it), not quite as jaded to the sheer grossness of morphing as I really wanted to be. "What's today's date?"

"The twenty-third." She was leaning around me to continue looking at Jake.

"Thanks." I pushed the form back through to her.

"If you're sure that the condition is not life-threatening...?" she asked Jake.

Jake, who was fully human and miserable-looking but not visibly dying, nodded. "I think I'm okay," he said. He sniffled and wiped his nose on the back of his hand.

"That's disgusting," I said. "There are, like, forty boxes of tissues all over the room, and you still..."

He shrugged, and now he just looked even more miserable.

Sighing, I stole a box of tissues off the desk and handed it to him, followed by several of the sanitary wipes also from the desk. "You're not supposed to infect other people," I told him as I ushered him over to a plastic seat and guided him into it.

"I don't think what I've got's contagious," he mumbled. "Anyway, it definitely can't affect anyone who's not morph-capable."

"So it's just me you'd be spreading your germs to. Thanks for your concern, midget, I'm touched."

He pulled his legs up onto the seat with him and hunched forward to rest his chin on his knees. It looked kind of ridiculous to have a kid as tall as him (don't tell him I said that) smushing himself into a tiny plastic seat. He shivered, pulling his arms into himself, and I understood why he was curled so tight.

I shrugged out of my jacket and dropped it on top of him.

"'m just gonna rip it next time I morph something big," Jake said, but he was burrowing into the denim and pulling it tighter around himself.

"Too bad. Your fashion statement is offending everyone in the room," I informed him, "and it's already too late to pretend I don't know you."

While he sniffled some more and tried to doze off, I found myself glancing around the room. Sure enough, every single person there was shamelessly gawking at us. Mostly Jake-which I guess was fair, considering he'd been a lizard five minutes ago-but me as well. One little girl was whispering to her mother, pointing openly at both of us. I waved to her and she blushed, ducking behind her mother's leg.

Jake had slept late this morning, and he hadn't had much of an appetite all day, but unfortunately neither one of those things was that unusual for him. I hadn't assumed that anything was wrong until he'd started turning into a dragonfly in the middle of some ongoing argument about Latrell Sprewell.

"Eew, God, cut that out," I'd said automatically.

Jake had looked up at me with rapidly-compounding eyes from where he'd shrunk down onto the floor and whispered, I can't.

Cue me grabbing the utterly disgusting half-human half-dragonfly off the floor, sprinting to the car, and possibly breaking landspeed records on the way to the hospital.

I'd frantically demanded an explanation on our way there, and all Jake could come up with was that one time Rachel'd morphed uncontrollably for a while because she was allergic to alligators. And he had acquired the neighbor's cat's DNA yesterday...

"How can you be allergic to house cat DNA but not tiger DNA? And why the hell did you want cat DNA in the first place?" I'd demanded in the middle of running a red light.

I don't know, he said sullenly. I was just petting Mrs. Guren's cat, and then she was getting all pissy and I didn't want to get scratched, so it was the only thing that came to mind. Sorry?

"Fine." I'd sighed, torn between wanting to check on him again and not wanting to look away from the road. "I should call Cassie, then."

NO!

"Jake..."

No, I'm fine!

We'd both been distracted from the conversation when he morphed again. Straight from dragonfly to lizard. No demorphing. No passing Go. No collecting two hundred dollars.

I may have started driving even faster then.

The sneezing had started not long after that. The chills and distinctive flush to his cheeks I could see now were both new.

Great. Just great.

"Is he okay?" The elderly woman next to me was leaning around to try and get a better look at Jake.

I had the irrational urge to throw a tarp over Jake so that people would stop paying attention to him. I knew how much it sucked being sick with other people around, and how much infinitely worse it was when those other people were concerned strangers.

"Sure," I said casually. "Cat allergies. Lots of people have 'em." Okay, most people were allergic to cat dander and not cat DNA, but I wasn't getting into that distinction with some old bat in an ER.

"Oh." She was still peering at Jake's sad huddle of limbs. "How does that work with him turning into a tiger?"

Just in case there was the slightest chance in hell anyone in the room _didn't _know who he was. Shit.

"That's what we're here to figure out." I think I managed to sound polite-ish, but firm enough to try and head off any more questions.

"Did yeerks do it to him?"

Never mind. "No, yeerks did not give him cat allergies!" I announced, loudly enough that Jake woke up and glanced over.

"Wha' yeerks?" he asked.

"Nothing. Go back to sleep."

"'kay."

Amazingly, he did as he was told almost instantly.

"Are you _sure_?" The old woman leaned toward me, whispering conspiratorially. "Because I heard that they're making a comeback."

"The yeerks?" I said, like I couldn't be totally sure she wasn't talking about some boy band.

She leaned in a little closer, voice dropping even more. "They could be anywhere. And you'd never even know. Because they hide inside people's brains, so no one knows how many of them stuck around, how many are in the government right now, setting up for the second wave of the invasion-"

"Please stop talking _right now_ before I have a paranoid freak-out in the middle of this emergency room," I said.

Mercifully, she did.

The room was silent for a few minutes except for Jake's occasional sniffles and the teenage boy three seats down from us, whose nose was bleeding and who kept coughing up even more blood into the paper cup he held. Neither he nor the girl who was there with him seemed all that concerned by this turn of events-she was playing a game on her cell phone, and he was reading a (by now thoroughly bloodied) paperback novel.

I was just pulling out my own phone to call my parents, debating whether I felt more like dealing with my mom's I'm-only-yelling-because-I'm-worried panic or my dad's hypochondria-by-proxy forty-diagnosis-long-list panic, when the young woman sitting across from us pulled out a small camera and surreptitiously snapped a picture of Jake.

"Seriously?" I said loudly. "He's a sick kid, not a museum exhibit."

She lowered the camera, looking so mortified I almost felt bad. "Sorry," she whispered. "It's just... My little sister's crazy-obsessed with the Animorphs. Wants to be one when she grows up."

I glanced over automatically, but Jake hadn't seemed to notice the flash, or my snapping at the young woman. He was drooling on my coat, and a slight scale pattern was starting to form under his skin.

"Lucky for your sister," I told the woman, "being grown up isn't actually one of the necessary qualifications for becoming an Animorph."

Her eyes widened sympathetically. She didn't say anything else.

And now I really felt bad for snapping at her. "What're you in for?" I asked.

Her smile was self-conscious. "Fell off a ladder. Think I broke my collarbone."

I was about to say something politely understanding when a nurse walked into the room-and started screaming at the top of his lungs. I whipped around to follow his gaze, hand reaching for a weapon that wasn't there as my brain frantically catalogued morphs I could use to kill whatever it was in case Jake couldn't. And then, when half the rest of the room started shrieking or pulling their legs up onto their chairs, I figured out Jake _was_ the problem.

Apparently, the little brat had an anaconda morph.

Jake flailed awake when he fell off the chair-not surprising, considering he was now over twenty-five feet long-and I had to jump out of the way to avoid getting knocked over by his enormous tail.

What happened? he blurted.

"What do you _think _happened?" I said. "Think you can change back?"

Um... He sneezed, the motion sending a violent ripple all along his coils.

The other half of the room pulled their legs up onto their chairs. The older woman who had been sitting next to me was standing on the seat of hers, clutching her purse to her chest.

"He's not rabid," I told her, trying my best to sound patient. "He's not even venomous, for that matter."

Jake nodded in agreement. Judging by the expression on her face, this didn't reassure her much.

"Jake... Berenson?" the nurse asked. His voice was barely present.

Hi, Jake said. Are they ready for us? He started to slither toward the door.

The nurse nodded, looking like it was taking every ounce of willpower he possessed not to jump up on a chair along with all the patients. He held the door open and Jake slithered through.

I sighed. "Next time I don't care what he says, I'm just calling Cassie," I muttered, grabbing my coat off the chair and following him.

They led us through a huge long room filled with curtain-obscured cells, down another hallway that had doors to actual hospital rooms lining either wall, and into an exam room kind of like my dad's. People kept glancing down at Jake and hastily jumping out of the way, some with expressions of ego-protective annoyance and a few with undignified shrieks of surprise.

Sorry, Jake kept telling people. Like it was his fault he accidentally turned into a snake.

The doctor who met us in the exam room, mercifully, did not scream or even seem that put out by the fact that her patient was currently a giant snake. She just directed Jake to sit on the bed, put a warming blanket over him because apparently tropical animals weren't that well-adapted to air-conditioned hospitals, and asked about his symptoms and medical history.

After several more minutes of interrogation Jake succeeded in demorphing, at which point she took his temperature and blood pressure and asked him to spell world backwards and hop on one foot.

And then she gave up.

"I'm sorry," she said, glancing between Jake and I. "I really have no experience with this kind of alien illness. Honestly I'm not sure if I should be calling a veterinarian or an andalite technology expert or what."

"Gosh," I said slowly. "If only there was someone we knew who was trained as a vet and also an expert at morphing. Someone we could call."

Jake's head jerked up as he glared at me. "No," he said flatly. "I'm fine."

I raised an eyebrow. "You don't know that for sure, do you?"

Jake wheezed out a stuffy-sounding sigh. "It's really okay. You don't have to worry-"

"Too fucking late-"

"-and you don't have to do anything drastic."

"I'm not being drastic, you're just being stupid," I snapped before I could stop myself.

The doctor was looking back and forth between the two of us like we were a high-speed and potentially dangerous tennis match.

She might have been right about the dangerous part, because I was about two seconds away from crossing the room, grabbing Jake, and shaking him until his head fell off. I had no idea what it was between him and Cassie—Okay, well, I had more of an idea than most of the news crews who tried to interview either of them about it—but being stubborn right now was just idiotic.

Jake looked away, staring across the long row of curtained-off cubicles toward the door at the far end. "Tom…"

I exhaled slowly, trying to let go of my annoyance with the air. "Look, squirt," I said. "I'll be the one to talk to her, okay? And I promise it'll be just talk. See if she has any other advice, anyone else she thinks we should call. I won't ask her to come here unless she thinks it's really important. I promise."

"This isn't a big enough deal to..." Jake glanced over at the doctor, who was fortunately examining her clipboard in a polite show of not knowing that there was any other conversation going on in the room. "You really don't know what you're talking about," he said at last, tone almost gentle.

I shrugged. "Probably not. But there's the slight matter of you being at any moment two seconds away from involuntarily turning into a fish and then not being able to turn back before—" I pressed my lips together, not wanting to contemplate the possibility too hard. I hadn't wanted to put the idea in his head at all, but I was also running out of patience.

"Yeah, but Cassie isn't going to be able to do anything. And it's…" He hunched in on himself. His skin was starting to change colors and his hair was disappearing again, but he hadn't seemed to have noticed yet.

"Complicated?" I suggested.

He didn't laugh or respond at all other than to hunch forward a little more. Which, yeah, it wasn't that funny. A little too close to being true to be funny.

"Sorry, midget, but I'm overriding you on this one," I said.

"I—" Whatever he was going to say next got cut off when the bed under him collapsed in on itself with a scream of twisted metal.


	2. Peripeteia

The doctor jumped to her feet with a noise of surprise.

"Fuck!" I snapped.

It took me a second to figure out what Jake was turning into other than the fact that he was growing so rapidly I also had to jump out of the way to avoid getting squashed by the giant fin that suddenly sprouted to fill half the cubicle. But then his skin started turning rubbery and black except for the area around his face which went white, and I realized what was happening.

"You have an orca morph?" I demanded. "_Seriously_?"

{Sorry,} he said.

I took a deep breath and tried not to panic. "I'm not mad at you," I said slowly. "I'm just… Um. Look, can you try and calm down? It seems to get worse when you're emotional, and…"

He was still growing even though he now filled most of the hallway. {And I'm going to get squashed to death by land gravity even if I don't collapse the entire hospital because whales can't survive on land?}

I hadn't wanted to mention it because I was pretty sure "you need to calm down" and "you're going to die horribly if you don't demorph soon" were mutually exclusive announcements.

"Think happy thoughts?" I offered weakly.

There were orderlies all over yelling to each other and hastily wheeling beds out of the way, security personnel hovering near the door looking like they didn't know what to do with themselves. The floor was making groaning noises but fortunately we were on the first floor and there didn't seem to be a basement or a sinkhole underneath us, because nothing had collapsed yet. Jake's bulk was pressed against the ceiling and both walls, but miraculously the only major piece of equipment he had destroyed so far was the monitor that had been next to the bed.

At least he seemed to be done morphing. For the moment.

{Sorry,} he repeated, this time to the room at large.

One of these days we were going to have a conversation about him feeling the need to apologize for things that weren't actually his fault. Right now, however, there were slightly more urgent concerns filling most of the hallway and threatening to burst through the ceiling.

The doctor was still backing up steadily even though she was already out of the range of Jake's now-giant flippers. Her clipboard was pressed to her chest. I felt a little bad, since this was so clearly out of her range of expertise, but I was also a little annoyed that she wasn't coming up with some kind of way to solve the problem.

{It'll be fine,} Jake said.

I could already hear him gasping for air, struggling against the weight that was crushing him down against the dry land and sapping his energy by forcing the whale's heart and lungs to work in overtime. There's a reason beached whales don't typically survive for more than a few hours. Between that knowledge and the enclosed space, Jake's orca brain had to be flipping out right now.

"You have ten seconds to change back before I call Cassie." I crossed my arms and tried not to look like I cared that one wrong twitch of his tail could squash me to death.

Jake flapped one fin in protest, looking a little pathetic. {What? That's not—}

"The situation has officially gotten out of control. You are going to die unless you demorph. So change back." I stared down the only eye I could actually see.

He was wheezing harder now, but that was the only difference I could detect.

"Okay, then."

{Wait—}

He was too late. I was already dialing.

All in all, getting through to Cassie's phone only to have the call go straight to voicemail was anticlimactic. And more than a little frustrating.

{Wait, look, I'm morphing out of whale! So hang up!} Jake said.

He was right; he was starting to look less black and white than before.

"I think you're turning into a bat," I pointed out reluctantly.

{Seriously? Damn it!}

The silver lining being that at least now he was shrinking.

I hung up on Cassie's voicemail, which had probably caught at least some random background noise, and dialed Marco because no other options came to mind.

He picked up on the third ring. "Jake, darling, you don't call, you don't write, you've gone all Captain America and now you're too good to hang out with little old me, I'm starting to think that—"

"It's me," I cut him off.

"Oh. Tom? What?"

"Sorry to disappoint you," I added.

"I'll recover somehow. What is it?"

The false cheer was gone now. He sounded anxious. Good, I thought, even though it was probably mean of me. It really was heartening to know that Marco worried about Jake, cared about him, that he was willing to show that much concern for his well being even months after Jake had stopped acknowledging his existence.

Jake had shrunk past human size by now, although he was still mostly whale-shaped except for the wings. He looked like a tiny and very ugly flying pig.

"I think Jake's allergic to house cats," I told Marco.

"Oh, shit. Keep him off the second floors of any buildings, okay?"

"Yeah, learning that the hard way," I said.

Jake was mostly bat by now, a tiny black shape huddled in the wreckage of the hospital bed he'd just created. Who are you talking to? he asked. Tell whoever it is that I'm fine.

"It's Marco," I told him.

{Oh. Then-}

"Try to keep him from turning into a rhino while you're at it," Marco was saying into the phone. "I'll be right over there."

"We're not at the house," I said. "We're at Marian Medical."

Marco made a small noise of acknowledgement. "Because you wanted to do something but when you suggested calling Cassie he freaked out and refused. And I'm guessing you two have been arguing about it since and he's cycled through eight more morphs by now. Okay, I'll meet you there. See what I can do."

Caught by surprise, I didn't answer right away. Other people—newscasters, yeerk vissers, Jake for that matter—tended to describe Marco as scarily intelligent. But most of the time all I could think of when his name came up was the hyperactive never-serious kid I'd babysat for dozens of times, who hadn't shown any particular spark of analytical brilliance outside of insane skill levels at Mario Kart.

"Thanks," I said at last.

"Sure, no problem. Oh, and Tom?"

"Yeah?"

"Don't let him turn into a giant squid, man. Not sure what would happen, but it'd probably be bad."

"Sure," I said dryly. "No problem. Since that is totally within my power to do."

"Great. Knew I could count on you. Be there in a jiff." He hung up.

{I'm sure it's nothing to worry about.} Jake was starting to sound like a broken record.

I crouched down next to him. The doctor still hadn't come back, so it was just us for the moment. "Can you try and just stay there for now? Marco said…" I trailed off, not wanting to put the idea of a giant squid in his head. I was dying with curiosity about how they'd ended up getting the DNA in the first place—there were most definitely not any giant squids at The Gardens—but knew that now was absolutely not the time to ask.

{Yeah. I think.} Jake pulled his little wings in closer to his body, a tiny bundle of dark fur that stuck out starkly against the white of the sheet he was sitting on. {When Rachel had the reaction to the alligator she mostly didn't morph as long as she was calm.}

Even through the old familiar twist of pain I managed a fond smile. "Rachel? Calm? How often did that happen?"

Maybe we should have been talking about something else, anyone else, while trying to keep Jake from morphing again, but he was the first one who said her name and I wasn't going to cut him off from one of the very few times he'd ever voluntarily brought her up.

{Once or twice? Maybe? If so I missed it.} Jake's thought-speak voice didn't have as much subtlety of inflection as a spoken one would have had, but there was still nuance of emotion underneath. Enough that I could tell he was feeling sort of like I was: melancholy, but willing to smile about the memory even knowing she was gone.

"So it was wildly inconvenient, then."

{You're not fucking kidding. Remember when her house collapsed?}

"That was _that_?" No wonder Marco had told me to keep Jake on the first floor.

Jake shuffled in place in his little bundle of sheets, ducking his head away from the bright hospital lights. {She turned into an elephant. By accident, I guess.}

I winced, glancing at the destruction around us. Lucky we were still on the first floor. "She made it on TV for that, right?"

{Um, technically that was Cassie who did the TV spot. Rachel was too busy turning into a grizzly bear to try and fight off the alligator whose DNA she was allergic to in the first place.}

Yeah, now that he mentioned it I had a vague memory of there being some kind of incident with wild animals escaped and running around the studio during the TV spot. Funny how often that used to happen around Jake and his friends. "So, what? The alligator followed her?"

{No, she, like, barfed it out or something.}

"Rachel vomited out an entire live alligator?" I think my voice got higher because I was a little freaked out. "Is that going to happen to you?"

{Probably not, seeing as it wasn't an alligator in the first place.} An osprey fluttered in to land on the ground next to me—apparently Marco hadn't bothered to demorph before flying straight into the building.

"It wasn't?" I glanced over at Marco in surprise. And then immediately regretted it. He had huge bird bones literally sticking out of the ends of his partly-human arms, his beak halfway melted off his face and sliding away into gooey nonexistence like someone had tried to burn his face off with acid and mostly succeeded. The bird feet that currently had human toes sticking off the ends were even grosser-looking.

"Nope," he said. It came out weird and squeaky—probably because at least one of his lungs wasn't done growing yet—but mostly comprehensible. "It was a crocodile."

{Wow, that's _such_ an important distinction,} Jake drawled. {Thank God you cleared that up.}

"Hey there, Batman," Marco said, grinning.

finally human now. He grinned, apparently not feeling any of the awkwardness that had me fiddling with the end of my sleeve and Jake partly ducking out of sight behind a fold of the sheet. "I feel like if this was anyone else on the team you'd already be delivering a stern Mom lecture on not randomly acquiring and using morphs that you don't know anything about."

{Yeah, I know, it was dumb,} Jake muttered.

"Good to know you're human like the rest of us, no matter what the newspapers say," Marco said. "Don't worry, I won't tell anyone about your little secret. It'll be just between the two of us." He turned away from Jake, glancing around the room and raising his eyebrows at me.

"Brief killer whale incident," I explained.

"Huh." He nodded. "Hey, doc!" he called suddenly.

The doctor who came over to us was a different one than before, and she was eyeing all three of us somewhat warily but at least not running away. "Yes?" she said.

"Marco Alvarez. Yes, _the_ Marco Alvarez." Marco shook her head. "Pleasure to meet you. What's your name?"

"Dr. Miranda Franklin," the new doctor said. She didn't look particularly impressed with his attempt at charm.

"Beautiful name, Dr. Franklin," Marco was still pumping her hand up and down, flashing her his movie-star grin. "Now, here's what we're going to do. My boy Jake here—who's very sorry about the destruction of property, didn't mean for it to happen, my publicist will write you a check and we can take care of it—is going to turn back into a human. And then you're going to give him just something light to keep him calm for the next couple days, maybe help him sleep it off, nothing too crazy, and then he's going to go home and probably birth a house cat out of the back of his head and we'll all be out of your hair. How's that sound?"

It should have come off as a used-car salesman spiel of nonsense, and yet it had enough genuine self-deprecation and was accompanied by enough traces of Marco's little-boy charm that I could see Dr. Franklin starting to smile uncertainly back at him.

{Marco…} Jake said.

"Right, sure, we'll get you a private room. Still on the first floor, though, yeah?" Marco plowed over him, even though he had to know that that wasn't what Jake was going to say.

{Yeah, okay,} he said.

"Um, right this way," Dr. Franklin said. She looked a little more in control of the situation now.

I scooped Jake up and gently cupped both hands around him rather than letting him flutter around randomly when he probably couldn't even see properly in a space this bright and loud.

{I can fly there on my own,} he groused.

"Demorph and you can walk there," I pointed out.

He shut up after that, riding in sullen silence with both sets of claws wrapped around my thumb as we left the whale-induced destruction behind and walked toward another room.

"Thank you," I said to Marco as we went through another set of doors.

He flashed me a quick, clearly false, smile. "Hey, no problem. I had to cancel with Jimmy Fallon for the moment, but I know he's good to call me back later."

I nodded. "Yeah, still, though. I'm not sure what's going on with any of this morphing stuff—not that I ever am, and—"

We both glanced down at Jake, who was remaining pointedly silent for now.

I could see the questions burning in Marco's expression as he looked back up and met my eyes. It was only too obvious how much he wanted to know how Jake was doing, what was happening, whether he was going to be okay.

I would have to talk to him later. Right now I wasn't about to leave Jake alone.

Dr. Franklin unlocked the door to another room and led us inside. I set Jake on one of the pillows, where he looked small and ridiculous. A bat in a hospital bed designed for a human.

"Okay, man, just go ahead and demorph," Marco said like it was the most natural thing in the world.

Jake, amazingly, did as he was told. Without any apparent trouble. Maybe Marco was right and the urgent tone I couldn't help was creating more problems than it was solving.

"It would be fascinating to get a frame-by-frame video of the process," Dr. Franklin said, leaning a little closer to Jake. "The number of comparison studies that could look at the differences between the process based on shifts between mammals versus the change to a reptile, or even a more distantly related species…" She sounded like she was talking to herself as much as either of us.

As far as reactions to morphing went, a creepy level of fascination with the process was at least better than screaming horror or uncontrollable vomiting.

"Call me, and I can morph for you as slow as you like," Marco said coyly.

"Seriously, man?" Jake said.

Marco batted his eyelashes. "I have to keep my little heart warm somehow, gorgeous."

"Get a room," I muttered.

Jake grimaced, but Marco gestured around us as if to take in the fact that they already had one.

"Do you have any known allergies?" Dr. Franklin asked Jake, suddenly all business.

"House cats?" he said dryly, propping his head against his hand. He sounded stuffy again, I noted.

"Do you have any known _drug_ allergies?" she prodded gently.

"Oh. Uh, no." He shrugged, almost tipping his head off his hand in the process.

I winced sympathetically. He'd morphed seven or eight times in the past two hours, and even if a most of those had happened automatically he still had to be practically dead with exhaustion.

"Okay. Then I'm going to give you a low dose of diazepam, enough for the next couple days," Dr. Franklin said. "It's a very mild sedative, and there's no risk of dependency for such a short administration time, but you should stop immediately and call your primary care physician if you experience any hyperactivity or notice any problems with your memory. I'm going to go ahead and keep you here for an hour or two after the first dose to be sure that—"

"I don't need anything, but thanks," Jake said flatly.

Dr. Franklin took a deep breath. "I'm aware that no treatment we currently know of will actually fix the presenting problem, but if Mr. Alvarez is correct in saying that heightened emotions cause the uncontrollable morphing, this should help prevent any extreme emotional experiences. I don't know if its effects will disappear when you morph—you'll have to judge that for yourself—but if they do it should be safe to take another dose once you're human again, as long as you wait twelve hours for any subsequent doses. This should help you control the symptoms."

"It's fine." Jake gave her a tired smile. "Seriously, it'll take care of itself in a few days and until then I'll deal with it on my own."

"Jake, having something to keep you from morphing accidentally will help a hell of a lot with the whole _dealing with it _process," I said. I tried to keep my tone soft to prevent the return of Free Willy.

Jake turned that ancient, weary smile on me, suddenly looking so much like our grandfather that I took a step back in surprise. "I'm sorry I worried you. It's not a big deal."

"Yeah, and neither is a little Valium for a couple days," I pointed out. "So what's the harm?"

"No. Just... no." His face was frozen in tight lines. "What if something happens?"

I made an impatient gesture in the air. "Then I'll deal with it." I didn't point out the war was over. Didn't tell him there was no way that anyone or anything was going to attack the house. That wasn't going to convince him.

"But you're not..." Jake cut himself off. I knew perfectly well what he wasn't saying: _but you're a civilian_.

"Then I'll call Marco and he'll deal with it."

"This is my decision, and I'm saying no."

He was scaring the hell out of me, which was only part of the reason I really wanted to punch him in the face right then. I _hated_ when he did this, insisted that there was nothing wrong even when we could all see him bleeding out. Hated it. Hated _him_, in that moment.

But I was pretty sure if I did punch him right now he'd just start morphing some more and we'd start the whole damn cycle over again.

"Jake, until we're through this thing, why not get a little help for right now?" I mostly succeeded at keeping my tone level. Mostly.

He shook his head, still wearing that old-man smile. "It won't be a big deal. I'll just chill out for a few days and it'll work itself out."

I inhaled slowly and exhaled without saying anything. I wasn't going to point out that he'd been having screaming nightmares three nights a week since long before the war ended. Or that the last time our dad had swatted a fly inside the house Jake had gone dead-white and looked like he was going to faint for a second before running out of the kitchen and spending the next two days unable to come out of his room. Or the way he flinched at small noises. Or the fact that the last time I'd accidentally snuck up on him he actually took a swing at me before he realized what he was doing.

I would give my left arm—I'd give fucking _anything_—to go back to a time when I could just figure he'd _chill out_ for a few days and it genuinely wouldn't be a big deal.

"Bullshit." Marco's voice was low and sharp with anger.

Jake's head snapped up, gaze immediately losing all of the softness of exhaustion. "_Excuse_ me?"

He'd shifted from acting the part of my little brother to Marco's former commanding officer in about half a second.

Marco hesitated, shoulders rising in tension, but he didn't back down. "You heard me. That's a load of shit and you know it."

Jake was also taut, both hands braced on the bed next to him, but he looked less tense than _certain_. Grounded. Solid in his own certainty and not about to back down for anything. "Last I checked you don't have the right to tell me how to run my life. Matter of fact, I'm not even sure what the hell you're doing here."

"I'm here because you're scaring the hell out of your family, you asshole!" Marco gestured at me so sharply that I flinched. "And you're scaring the hell out of me!"

"Well, I'm _so sorry_ if my failure to get a bimbo model girlfriend and a mansion in Orange County is keeping you up at night." Jake pushed himself to his feet, barely bracing himself on the bed even though he was white-faced with exhaustion. "But I'm dealing the best I can."

"Yeah, and I'm Princess Di-"

"I'm _dealing_."

"No, you're-"

"And if that's not up to your standards for _forgetting the war ever happened_ and buying eight cars with my royalties from Underarmor ads instead, that's really not my fucking problem."

"Your goddamn macho I'm-the-leader-I-don't-emote load of shit was always going to get you killed one of these days." Marco was shaking, fists clenched at his sides, face inches from Jake's. He had to tilt his chin up to look Jake in the eye, but he wasn't backing down.

Jake opened his mouth to answer.

Marco cut him off. "And it looks like this is your lucky day. What happens when you morph a giant squid, huh? You think they'll be able to find a way to get you to the ocean before you suffocate? I'm betting not. Or how about the taxxon morph? If you lose control there, you're going to end up _eating _someone, and won't that be awkward. Or, hey," Marco said, face twisting into something that was midway between a smile and a grimace. "Maybe you'll get lucky. Use that termite morph for the first time, find out what the rest of us are talking about. Better hope someone finds a way to track you down and get you out before the two hours are up, or else you'll be better off dead by the time you're a nothlit."

Jake was starting to morph again. Neither of them seemed to notice. Or if they did, I don't think they cared.

Dr. Franklin shot me a look over Marco's head, clearly wondering if she should try to do something. I shook my head fractionally.

"I can handle it on my own," Jake said flatly. "Butt out."

"Not going to." Marco took another step forward until they were almost touching, seemingly careless of the fact that Jake was getting steadily larger, and something weird was happening to his skin.

"Why the hell not?" Something was happening to Jake's voice now too. It had a strange high-pitched undertone. His skin was starting to turn dark but also to glow with a weird red sheen, like hardening lava. I had no clue what kind of animal looked the way he was starting to.

"Because you _can't_ handle it." Marco glanced down at the way Jake was changing, went visibly paler, and then pushed through anyway. "Because in case you hadn't noticed, you're turning into a Howler, _you dumbass_, and if you're not careful you're going to fucking kill all of us. Because it could fucking kill you! Because your stupid-ass refusal to admit there's ever anything wrong is _already_ on its way to killing you!"

Jake had sprouted retractable claws by now, but he wasn't turning into a tiger that I could tell. More like some kind of weird hominid thing with a differently shaped waist. His eyes were a brilliant electric blue. "Then it'll kill me!" he yelled, and now there was a sound like nails on a chalkboard underneath.

"Sorry, man, I can't let that happen." Marco crowded forward even further, even though he kept on glancing warily at the shape Jake was taking on.

Jake shook his head. "It's not your problem."

"Yes it is," Marco said tightly.

The expression on Jake's face looked like contempt, but it was hard to tell when he was a... whatever he was. "Why exactly is that?"

"Because _you're hurting me too,_ you asshole!" Marco yelled.

Jake flinched back a step.

There were tears on Marco's face, and he sounded less angry now. More uncertain. More afraid. "Jake, man. You're my best friend. You've been looking out for me since we were snot-nosed brats and you latched onto me on the playground even though I was the weird-looking kid Jennifer Murdley liked pushing in the mud and you were already all cool and confident. You let me blow your entire allowance one quarter at time any time I didn't have any money for the arcade.

"You..." He swallowed, the motion sharp and angry. "You got me through that first year after my mom died when I could barely stand to drag my ass out of bed most mornings and my dad was even worse. I don't even know how many times you saved my life during the war but I know it was a hell of a lot. But so much more important than that... You were there for us. You were the one taking all the responsibility for the hard calls even when half the time it was my idea that ended up with all of us up shit creek without a paddle. You carried us through, and we all owe you a hell of a lot more than just our lives for that."

Marco seemed to run out of steam all at once, shoulders dropping and stance going limp. "I owe you everything, man," he said at last. "And it fucking rips me apart when you're letting yourself bleed to death rather than admit that you're hurt. And I know this asshole feels the same way-" He waved a hand at me. "Even though your whole damn family is too filled with stoic macho idiots for him to say anything about it."

Jake didn't answer. His eyes were closed, his face turned away. But he was starting to demorph again.

"I know I haven't been there for you, man, not like I should. But please, if you still give half a shit about me," Marco pleaded. "Or your family, or anyone else that loves you because we've got no fucking choice, what with you being _you_. Please just try."

"So that's it, then." Jake's voice was cold with anger, even though he was looking at the floor. "I'm supposed to do what makes _you_ happy. Keep right on being responsible for your shit regardless of how I might feel about it."

"No," Marco said. "If that was the case... You'd just paint your game face on, I know you would, and keep trying to ignore your shit until it killed you. But that's not what this is. Because you're not doing any of this because it's what makes you-or anyone else-happy. You're doing it because you're punishing yourself. For all the shit you pulled during the war. All the shit Rachel and I pulled too, while we're at it, because it's never been enough for you to be responsible for yourself, has it?

"If you want to make up for what happened, fine. I say let it go, it was in the past, we did what we had to, but that's not..." He swallowed. "That's not you. So I'm saying this: Whatever you plan on doing to try and make up for what happened? Not making everyone around you miserable might be a good way to start."

Jake didn't say anything. I could see the tension slowly leaking out of his shoulders and arms, his posture slumping slowly forward as the anger of a second ago wore off. I lunged forward when he started to slump even further and almost fell over, but Marco caught him first.

Jake pulled away almost immediately, swaying as soon as he was standing on his own and hastily sliding back to sit on the bed. His head was drooping like holding it up took too much effort, his whole body hunched forward toward his lap.

"Jake..." I whispered. And then I stopped. I had no idea what to say that would avoid either sounding like I was taking Marco's side or coming off like I was taking his.

"You said something about a sedative?" he said quietly to his hands, resting limp on his knees. "Because right now I'm fucking sick of morphing."

"Yes, diazepam. It has one of the highest success rates of the more common minor tranquilizers, and it has the advantage of starting to work almost immediately on most patients, unlike most milder sedatives," Dr. Franklin continued as if she had never been interrupted. I mentally awarded her an extra seventy billion points for bedside manner if none of _that_ had shaken her up.

Jake didn't acknowledge her-he looked like he was about two seconds away from dozing off-but she kept going.

"The most common side effect is a low level of cognitive impairment-that is, a feeling of disjointed thought processes complicated by greater difficulty concentrating-so if you start to experience those symptoms and become uncomfortable, please let me know and we can adjust the dose or look for alternatives. There is a high risk of dependency on most benzodiazepines with long-term use, so if you were interested in exploring that option..." She trailed off, leaving space for Jake to say anything.

He glanced up at her, let his eyes travel over Marco and I, and then didn't say anything. Didn't nod or shake his head.

Dr. Franklin let it go, and I decided to do the same. It was a step in the right direction, and I wasn't going to try to do everything in one day.

"Then we'd have to discuss alternative options," she continued as if she had never paused. "In the meantime, I'll give you a script for four weeks' doses and the option of a single refill. Am I correct in assuming that will be enough time for you to work through the current presenting problem?" She glanced at Marco when she said it.

Marco raised his eyebrows at her and flashed her a small, quick smile that Jake didn't catch. She gave him a tiny nod and turned back to Jake.

"If the problem persists or gets worse after that time..." She gave a small self-conscious laugh. "Well, I can't promise that if you come back in we'll be able to help, but I'm sure there are a lot more things we could try. I'll also give you the names of several doctors who could prescribe a more long-term course of anti-anxiety meds, just in case you happen to be interested in exploring that possibility in the future."

Jake didn't even bother looking up this time.

"Okay, then," Dr. Franklin said, as if she'd gotten an answer. "There are a few forms I need you to sign, and then I can give you the first dose. A nurse will be in soon to take care of all that. Do you have any other questions for me before I go?"

Jake shook his head. He looked defeated, worn-out. Like he had nothing left to give.

I exchanged a glance with Marco. God I hoped we'd done the right thing.

Marco lifted a shoulder halfway and let it drop. He was still watching Jake, expression unreadable.


	3. Preconvalescent

We stepped out into the hall, leaving Jake alone with the nurse.

"Hey, uh, thanks," I said awkwardly.

Marco ignored this. "How is he?"

"He's..." I wasn't sure how much Jake would want me to say. "He's trying," I said at last. "He's okay, I guess, even if there's a lot of crap he's working through right now."

Marco was watching me closely, stare uncomfortably piercing. "So I'm gonna take that as a 'not well.'"

I wanted to snap at him - it was none of his damn business and he had no right to judge - but what I said instead was, "Yeah, well, you put any thought into that whole _being a better friend _thing you mentioned?"

Marco winced, looking away. "I'll try, okay?"

"Thanks," I said again.

"And how're you doing?" He was peering intently at me.

"What? I'm fine," I said. "I'm great. Really."

Just for a second his eyes narrowed but then he laughed suddenly, an angry edge to the sound. "You and Tobias should play poker sometime, you know that?"

I could figure out what he was getting at but I was sure as all hell not talking about my feelings with Marco of all people. "In case you can't tell from the sound of my voice, I have had a really long day and I'm about one smartass comment away from punching you."

Marco held up both hands. "Okay, okay, fine. I'll just go back to my incredibly fabulous life and my gorgeous girlfriend and leave you stoic losers here. Tell Jake - "

"Tell him yourself."

He grinned suddenly. "Yeah, okay. Will do. Be seeing you."

I turned away, not watching him go. I really was grateful to Marco. I just wasn't sure I particularly liked him.

Jake was silent on the ride home. Fortunately he didn't morph any more, although he was still breathing stuffily. _Un_fortunately, when we walked in the door both our parents were sitting at the kitchen table wearing identical cold expressions.

"Where have you been?" Mom demanded.

Jake and I exchanged a glance of confusion. Neither of us were sure if we'd ended up in the wrong house and accidentally wandered into a sitcom in the process. It was five-thirty in the afternoon, not two AM, and we'd been gone less than four hours. Considering the number of times that both of us had gotten away with sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night or disappearing for hours on end with the flimsiest of excuses, this was a little... unexpected.

Dad stood up. "Your mother asked you a question."

I was sorely tempted to make a sarcastic comment about how we'd been off doing drugs and robbing banks, but lucky for me Jake beat me to the punch.

"We were at the hospital. I'm allergic to morphing cats but I'll be fine in a few days," he said tiredly. "Sorry we didn't call."

That, of course, did exactly nothing to forestall the coming explosion.

"You were _where?"_

"Oh my god, what happened?"

"_And you didn't tell us?"_

"Are you both all right? The only important thing is that you're all right."

"No, Steve, the only important thing is that they went to the hospital and didn't even - "

"Guys!" I said. "It's okay. Seriously. I just overreacted but it was no big deal."

Dad took a deep breath, looking like he really wanted to start yelling again but was controlling himself for now. "Apparently you underreacted, because the appropriate thing to do would have been to call us."

"We were a _little_ busy," Jake muttered.

"We're not blaming you, sweetheart." Mom stood up as well, looking Jake over like he was concealing massive injuries from her. "We just - "

"What, blame Tom instead?" Jake asked.

"That wasn't what she said, midget."

"We're not blaming anyone." Mom's tone definitely didn't give me reason to believe that was true. "But the next time you feel like disappearing for hours on end without telling anyone..."

"Don't," Dad finished.

"Why?" I said, annoyed that they had apparently decided to padlock the barn around dead cows. "It's never bothered you guys in the past."

Mom flinched. I felt like an asshole.

"We are not turning this into an accusation contest," Dad snapped. "What you did was immature and irresponsible, and I can't tell you how worried we were."

I gave up. "I'm sorry. Won't happen again."

Dad crossed his arms. "It had better not."

Eight or nine petty and sarcastic responses to that wandered through my head, but I kept them to myself. "Yeah, fine, sure."

"If anything else happens," Mom said firmly, "You call us. Right away. We want to know. And that means bringing your phone with you everywhere. And calling us. No matter what."

"Sure, since you guys would be a _huge_ help if one of us was actually getting ax-murdered or abducted by aliens," I muttered.

Jake kicked me to shut me up. About three seconds too late.

"_Excuse me_?" Mom demanded.

"If you're going to stand there and be flippant like a _child_ then I don't see how you can possibly expect us to trust you to have even the minimum amount of responsibility necessary to - "

"It would have taken two seconds to call us, and you apparently never thought - "

They were talking over each other; I lost the thread of what they were saying. I took a deep breath, actually considering trying to apologize. That had come out a lot harsher than I meant it to. I wasn't trying to hurt them, they'd just pissed me off, and now…

"Go ahead," Mom said. "Give me an excuse to ground you for the rest of your natural life."

I wanted to roll my eyes. Oh, no. Being trapped in my room for a couple weeks. Unable to come and go as I chose. That'd really show me. How cruel and unusual. How would I ever cope with the loss of freedom?

"Leave him alone," Jake said sharply.

"Jake…" Mom looked like she was at a loss.

"What?" He tilted his chin up a degree. "It's not as though he kidnapped me and dragged me to the hospital. I could have called you guys at any time, and I didn't either. So get off his case." He leveled a look at both of them that was not so much defiant as daring.

That shut them both up, at which point Jake chose to walk out of the room. That's the thing about Jake: he can get just about anyone to listen to him by just acting totally certain that _of course_ he'll be listened to.

Mom, Dad, and I didn't meet each other's eyes for several seconds.

"Cat allergies, huh?" Dad said at last.

I shrugged. "Some weird morphing thing. He's fine."

"Okay." Dad took a deep breath like he was considering saying something else, but ultimately didn't. "Okay."

When no one said anything else I left. I went upstairs as well and tried really hard not to act like I was hovering outside Jake's door waiting for him to turn into a rhinoceros and bring the whole house down while actually… Doing just that.

But he didn't, not for the rest of the afternoon. And he slept through the night. Which is to say he was quiet all night; I don't know for sure if he dreamed or not. Anyway, when I felt the need to wander downstairs for a while at three in the morning to try and shut up my jerk brain, there was no sign of him.

The next day he seemed better-rested too. He actually ate breakfast with Dad before Dad left for work, rolled his eyes but agreed to tag along when Mom dragged him out of the house to go shopping later in the day, and contributed a couple things to the conversation over dinner. As far as I knew there were no other weird spurts of morphing, which was good. We were all still waiting for him to spontaneously sprout out an extra cat the way Marco had assumed he would, but nothing happened yet.

He slept through that next night too.

I considered sending flowers to Dr. Franklin and concluded that that would be creepy of me. Then I toyed with the idea of sending flowers to Marco instead, before deciding that I'd never live down the eternal sexual harassment I'd get in return if I did.

Maybe I should have been more cautious. Shouldn't have taken twelve hours of almost-typical activity after a single night to be any kind of sign.

But hey. If you can say one good thing about humans, at least we keep on hoping for a better outcome under the stupidest of circumstances. Just ask any yeerk. It's one of the primary things that drives them nuts about us.

Which is why I thought everything was going pretty well, right up until I came downstairs and found Jake perched on the back of the couch like a demented gargoyle, balanced on the fabric and barely hanging on with his fingertips to keep himself from tipping off onto the floor.

I stopped, taking in the scene, and then glanced around to be sure that he wasn't reacting to anything in the room. He wasn't. Not that I could see, anyway. "What the hell are you doing, squirt?"

Jake looked surprised at the question, and then he glanced down at himself. "Um. I think I just wanted to be up here, and then I… was?"

There was really no good way to phrase the question "are you going completely nuts or does it just look like it?" so I settled for waiting for him to say anything else.

"Y'know, I think it's the cat DNA," he said at last. "Like, it kind of feels like I've got a tiger brain, only… not."

"Oookay." I walked slowly forward, hoping that I didn't startle him and cause him to try and claw me with claws he didn't have. "Let's hope that that's the case. Do you remember if…?"

If Rachel had had anything similar. It had been three months and I still couldn't say her name without an automatic moment of hesitation. Damn it.

Jake cocked his head in a way that looked, well, cat-like. "She did bite Jeremy Jason McCole just before she barfed up the alligator. Maybe that had something to do with it."

I filed _my cousin once bit one of the most famous teen actors of all time _under things I was really going to have to get the full story on one of these days (slightly below _where'd they get a giant squid?_ and a little north of _anaconda?_), and nodded like this made perfect sense to me. "Does that mean that you're going to—?"

Jake answered the question by starting to morph. At least, that's what I thought it was for a second when his left shoulder started to bulge and shift and change shape, his whole body twisting toward that point like there was something moving under his skin. Then I realized that nope, there was actually _something moving under his skin_.

The shape grew and gained definition, stretching away from his body and pulling the fabric of his shirt outward until it suddenly split. A grey housecat tore itself away from his body and jumped off the couch onto the floor. It crouched there, hissing, like it was daring either of us to get too close.

It was all over in a matter of seconds.

"Oh," I said.

"Gross," Jake commented. He slumped down to sit on the couch normally, watching the cat in the corner.

"My standards of 'gross' are so fucked, because that was just about the _least_ gross thing I've ever seen you do with morphing tech," I admitted.

"Felt grosser," he said. "Or weirder, anyway."

I tried really hard not to think about that one scene in _Alien _as I turned toward the corner, but it looked like… a cat. Specifically, the ugly bowlegged cat that belonged to our next door neighbor Mrs. Guerin.

The cat looked back at me. And then it snarled.

"What did Rachel end up doing with the extra crocodile?" I asked.

"Turned into a grizzly and attacked it," Jake said, tone dripping with _duh_. "And then it ate a yeerk and then Ax killed it."

The cat was looking between the two of us with its fur puffed out and its ears flat against its head, wagging its butt like it really wanted to pounce on one of us but just barely had enough sense not to attack either much larger creature currently threatening it. It looked sort of pathetic huddled there, clearly wigged out and unable to figure out how it had just spontaneously come into existence in the middle of an unfamiliar living room.

"I guess we can't kill it," I admitted at last. "And we don't have any yeerks handy either. Shame."

Jake gave me a scandalized look. "Of course we can't _kill _her! It's not her fault she's here."

There was a comment in there about Cassie rubbing off on him, but I kept it to myself.

In the end Jake pulled some string for the cat to chase while I sat down at the computer and started putting together an ad for it on eBay. Figuring we'd get more hits and a faster sale that way, I told the truth about the cat's odd origin story and uploaded a cell phone picture of Jake holding the thing and looking doofy in the preview section.

"Poor Muffins," Jake said, rubbing behind the cat's ears while it purred loudly and kneaded its claws into the carpet. "Everything must be confusing right now for you."

I made a strangled noise of horror. "No. Just - No."

Jake looked up. "What?"

"You are not calling that cat 'Muffins.'"

Jake looked back down at the cat, which had gotten bored with his petting and was now batting a stray piece of paper across the floor. "She's got Muffins's DNA, so she's basically a clone of - "

"Then we owe it to her to come up with a better name than 'Muffins,'" I said flatly. "Bad enough that Mrs. Gruen named _one_ cat that. We are not perpetuating the cycle by inflicting 'Muffins' on a second one."

"Fine, then." Jake scooped the cat up, holding her up to the light as if expecting to find a name stamped on her. "What are we supposed to call her? Mini-muffins? Clone of Muffins? Muffins the Sequel? Muffins II: The Revenge?"

Muffins II: The Revenge apparently didn't appreciate being picked up, because she swatted Jake on the nose, leaving shallow scratches across his skin.

"How about anything that isn't a derivative of Muffins?" I said. "I mean, _Muffins_? All other concerns aside, who the hell gives their cat a name that's plural?"

"Yeah," Jake said, carefully shifting his grip on the cat until she retracted her claws. "Although it's kind of apropos now that there are multiple Muffinses, right?"

"And then there's the fact that Mrs. Guerin _apparently_ wanted her cat to grow up to be a stripper, because _Muffins_? Really?" I shuddered.

"Poor thing," Jake agreed, apparently not caring that he still had blood running down his cheek from the shallow scratches she'd left on him. "Okay, how about Kitty Pryde? And then for a nickname - "

"Oh my fucking god," I said slowly. "Jake, 'Shadowcat' is probably the only cat name on the planet that is actually worsethan 'Muffins.' No. Just... no."

Muffins II: The Revenge was either deeply literal or had no taste, because she was back to purring now.

"Any of the X-Men who _isn't_ Shadowcat," I insisted. "Rogue. Perfectly good cat name. Jubilee. Beast. Emma Frost. Angel. Lots of people name their cats Angel."

"She's a girl cat," Jake protested, holding her tighter. "And Kitty Pryde has the most badass powers." Dear god I hoped he wasn't getting attached to that thing, because currently she was on sale for over five thousand dollars on eBay and the price was still racing upwards.

"She's a _cat_ and therefore doesn't speak English and probably doesn't care about human genders." I sighed. "I mean, by your reckoning we should be calling her Mini-Jake or Jake: The Empire Strikes Back or Jakeses or - "

"Okay, okay, shut up," Jake said.

Rather than write "Muffins: The Sequel" or anything equally stupid on the ad, I just left the title at "Cat. No fleas. No rabies shot. Cat carrier not included. Animorph sold separately."

"We should just let whoever buys her name her," I told Jake.

"And that's another thing. How do we know she's going to a good home?" he asked, holding Muffins II: The Revenge a little closer to his chest.

"Because I'll tell whoever shows up that if they mistreat the cat they'll get eaten by a tiger," I drawled, refreshing the page yet again.

"You think that's a good idea, right?"

Yes, Jake was talking to the cat, not me. Great. He really was getting attached.

And then he glanced back up at me. "But how will we know? Anything could happen, and I have responsibility for her now, you know."

"No you really fucking don't," I said patiently.

"It's my fault — "

"It's your fault nothing. That cat is the result of a very _very_ weird technological mishap and nothing else."

Jake looked back down at Muffins II: The Revenge, biting his lip. "But — "

"I'll assure any buyers that 'we have our ways of knowing,'" I said, air quotes and all. "And then I'll remind them that they have no way of knowing if you're a fly on the wall at any time. And if they're not completely freaked out into abandoning the sale and running for their lives, then we'll know they're probably trustworthy."

Muffins II: The Revenge snuggled a little closer to Jake, purring now. Like that was helping anything.

"Okay," he said. "But you don't think we should hang onto her for just a little while, just to make sure that she's completely normal and nothing is going to happen to her if we let someone else take her? After all, the other people probably aren't going to be experts at taking care of cats with her kind of, um, unusual past."

"Jake. Read my lips. We. Are not. Keeping. The damn. Cat."

Jake shot me a look that I would have fallen for five years ago but didn't fool me right now into thinking that he was actually hurt. I'd seen Jake when he was shocked, horrified, had the carpet yanked out from under him by something I'd said. This was just him faking puppy eyes to try and be manipulative.

"Homer would be devastated because he'd think you didn't love him anymore," I pointed out. "And Mom and Dad would probably just forbid you from getting any more pets anyway. Oh, and have you forgotten that you're _allergic_?"

"Yeah, but..." He looked down at the purring cat.

I gave up. "Fine. If you really want to take it up with Mom and Dad, I'll pretend I agree with you."

Jake sighed. And then he set Muffins II: The Revenge on the floor. "No, you're right. She'd probably be better off elsewhere."

"Look, if it makes you feel any better, the bidding is now at…" I refreshed the screen and raised an eyebrow. "Eighteen thousand dollars. So whoever gets her is going to be rich and _extremely _committed to the idea of owning this particular cat. Probably not going to be some batty old lady who has forty other pets and no way to take care of them."

"Yeah," Jake muttered. "You're right."

Muffins II: The Revenge rubbed against his leg. Manipulative animal.

I started to answer when something else on the screen caught my eye. You know those stupid personalized ads that try to suck you into a death spiral of buying shit on eBay for all of eternity until eventually you go bankrupt?

_If you like Animorphs merchandise,_ this one read, _You'll love the genuine unaltered Sharing t-shirts available at Second Time Around Gifts!_

"What?" I said out loud.

"What is it?" Jake circled around to look at the screen over my shoulder, probably reacting to my incredulous tone of voice.

I clicked on the ad.

Yep. It was a Sharing t-shirt. Slightly used. Nearly new condition. Promising to be the genuine article. Bidding had already gone over three hundred dollars.

"Huh?" I said.

"Controllers?" Jake asked.

"Doubt it. They kinda blew that cover a while back," I said absently.

I was paying more attention to the description, which read: _Express your inner edgy commentary with this cutting-edge new item, which will show off your finely-honed sense of irony! Don't settle for the cheap knock-off shirts being mass-produced over at Abercrombie and Fitch; get the genuine article here today! Get it quick before everyone has one!_

"Why are people selling Sharing t-shirts?" Jake said. "More importantly, why is Abercrombie and Fitch selling knock-off Sharing shirts?"

I smiled bitterly at the screen. "Because it's edgy and ironic, apparently."

It was weirding me out a little, too, to tell the truth. I'd seen a couple former controllers with heavily modified Sharing merchandise — including a few shirts that had been annotated with Sharpie to include slogans like "Join the Sharing - you have nothing to lose but your brains!" or "Come for the volleyball, stay because you have no choice!"

But I hadn't heard of people treating the Sharing like the world's weirdest fan club before this. Or of hawking the leftover shit to people who were apparently bored with band t-shirts and fake bike chains and wanted something more controversial and offensive.

"Maybe I should forget selling the cat and start raiding my closet for stuff to auction off instead," I said, trying to sound casual.

"But what's the _point_ of it?" Jake asked.

"To show off how little you care about current issues. To shock people. To be an asshole teenager the way that asshole teenagers have been assholes since the dawn of time. I don't know."

Jake was staring away from the screen, expression grim.

"And what the hell is 'Animorphs merchandise'?" I asked, looking back at the screen.

Sure enough, the distraction worked: Jake's head whipped back around and he leaned toward the screen. "What merchandise?"

I clicked on the ad from the ad. This time a whole bunch of sales popped up. The first entry was for "Jake Berenson action figure — Really morphs!"

Jake let out what I could only describe as a squeak of horror.

I opened the listing and we both crowded close to the screen, squinting at the little preview image.

There were several seconds of silence during which we both tried to comprehend what we were actually seeing, and then I gave up and said, "Okay, is that supposed to be a human or a hork-bajir?"

Jake leaned even closer to the screen, elbowing my hand off the keyboard and zooming in on his own. "Hork-bajir don't have two heads. That definitely has two heads."

"What? Where's the second one?"

He moved the cursor over a lump sticking off the shoulder of the… thing. "See?"

"Yeah, that's the first one, but where's the second one?"

He pointed. "Uh, there."

"Are you sure that's not a second tail?"

He glanced sideways at me, biting his lip. "Maybe, but... Why would it have two tails?"

I shrugged elaborately. "Why would it have two heads?"

"Better than one," he said, as if that actually answered the question.

"Pretty sure that that doesn't usually refer to them both being stuck to one body," I said. I double-clicked on the image and it suddenly filled the screen.

We both recoiled with noises of horror.

"Oh, _I_ get it," I said finally.

"How?"

"It's supposed to mid-morph," I said. "Mid-morph into a… a…"

Jake was tilting his head at the screen. "What's that thing Visser Three could do with the tentacles and the weird lumpy spike things?"

I leaned back from the screen a little, trying to see what he was talking about. "Oh, you mean the one that shot poisonous goo?"

Fortunately, we were interrupted when the computer let out a pinging noise letting me know that the bidding time window was closed. Because I'd been starting to nudge the cursor toward the little "Buy it now!" button in the corner of the screen.

"Okay, Muffins the Second, you now belong to… a fashion designer in Sun Valley who likes to be known as 'feathered_demon1972,' and has four hundred twenty-six thousand dollars to drop on a cat with no name. God _damn_."

And yes, now I was talking to the cat too. Shut up.

Muffins II: The Revenge, who already seemed to be learning her new name, jumped up on the desk and pranced over the keyboard to get to Jake. She plopped herself down in his lap and started nudging her head insistently on his wrist until he gave in and started petting her again.

"Don't worry," Jake told her. "I'll make sure it's a good home."

I sent the fashion designer a quick email asking how soon he could be over to pick up his new prize, explaining that it was fairly urgent seeing as we didn't own a litter box. He was by less than an hour later, having fortunately brought a cat carrier of his own. The little monster made pathetic mewing noises when Jake let her go like she was deliberately trying to break his heart. But as soon as the guy with more money than sense started petting her she calmed right down and started purring again, which made us both feel a lot better.

We didn't hear anything else from Muffins II: The Revenge until the fashion designer emailed us a week later to gush about how nicely she was settling in and making friends with all his other cats. Apparently he'd decided not to keep the name we'd given her. Which, all things considered, was probably for the best. Instead, he just called her "Tiger."

* * *

**A/N:** Sorry for the delay in posting, which mostly comes from the fact that it took me forever to find a name I liked for this one; working titles included "He Ain't Heavy (He's a Lizard)," "My Anaconda Don't Want None Unless You Fight Yeerks, Son," "The Three Lives of Thomas(ina)," "Muffins Episode II: Attack of the Clones," and "Things You See in an ER." More to come in this 'verse soon.


End file.
